Category: Education

Extreme weather events

Nature is really starting to speak to mankind!

I started writing this post back on the 25th September.  Why so far back?  Because that day something came into my in-box that deserved the widest circulation.  It’s an event being held just under a month from today, November 14th.  But it seemed worthwhile to give this amount of notice.  However, the reason why I wanted to start it back in September was because in the last 24 hours of that day, the 25th, the UK offered very good evidence of the significant increase in severe weather.

From the UK’s Met Office blog on the 25th September, 2012, (I have included the inches equivalent of the mm figures)

Rainfall figures: over a month’s worth of rain in two days

Rainfall totals for the past few days – from 1:00 am Sunday morning to 8:00 am this morning [Tuesday] – show some areas have already had more than twice their usual September rainfall. Ravensworth, in North Yorkshire, has seen the highest total, with 107.8 mm [4.24 in] falling, over 200 % of its average September rainfall.

The rainfall has been widespread, with many areas across the United Kingdom receiving large totals. Killylane, in Antrim Northern Ireland saw 98.2 mm [3.87 in], and high totals were also recorded in the south-west, with 72.4 mm [2.85 in] in Filton and 65.2 mm [2.57 in] at Dunkeswell Aerodrome.

Dunkeswell Aerodrome in Devon was where I used to fly our group-owned Piper Super Cub, still in military markings.

Piper Super Cub at Dunkeswell Aerodrome
A carriage made for two!

Anyway, back to the plot!

Also on that day (September 25th) the website Think Progress released this item,

Markey/Waxman Report: Carbon Pollution Creating A ‘Cocktail Of Heat And Extreme Weather’

By Climate Guest Blogger and Stephen Lacey on Sep 25, 2012 at 3:31 pm

by Katie Valentine and Stephen Lacey

Two House Democrats have released a report that aims to connect the dots on climate change and extreme weather events.

The staff report, issued by Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.), outlines the past year’s record-setting temperatures, storms, droughts, water levels and wildfires, and is being circulated in an attempt to rebuild congressional momentum to address climate change.

“The evidence is overwhelming — climate change is occurring and it is occurring now,” said Rep. Waxman, a Ranking Member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, in a statement.

The report outlines the stunning array of record-breaking extreme weather events throughout 2012 within five categories:

Extreme temperatures

  • July was the hottest month ever recorded in the continental U.S.  Some areas were 8 degrees warmer than average, with the average temperature in the lower 48 states at 77.6 degrees Fahrenheit, 3.3 degrees above the 20th century average.
  • Spring 2012 saw the warmest March, third-warmest April and second-warmest May in history, and was approximately 5.2 degrees Fahrenheit above average overall.
  • Through late June 2011, daily record highs were outnumbering daily record lows by 9-to-1.

Drought

  • As of September, 64 percent of the continental U.S. is experiencing drought, with August and September 2012 comparable to the worst months of the 1930s Dust Bowl.
  • By the beginning of August, more than half the counties in the U.S. had been designated disaster zones because of drought.
  • As of August, 51 percent of corn and 38 percent of soybeans grown in the U.S. were rated as poor or very poor by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Some states’ corn fared worse – Indiana had 70 percent of its corn rated as poor or very poor, and Missouri had 84 percent.

Wildfires

  • This fire season 8.6 million acres – roughly the size of Connecticut and New Jersey combined – have burned in the U.S., with fires still burning in parts of the West.
  • Wildfires in Colorado have killed six people, destroyed 600 homes and caused about $500 million in property damage.
  • There has been nearly a four-fold increase in large wildfires in the West in recent decades, with fires burning longer and more intensely and wildfire seasons lasting longer.

Storms

  • Tropical Storm Debby caused Florida to have its wettest June on record. The storm killed at least seven people and also damaged more than 7,500 homes and businesses.
  • In July, the “derecho” storm system killed at least 23 people and left more than 3.7 million people without power.
  • In August, Hurricane Isaac caused storm surges of up to 15 feet in some places and contributed to Louisiana and Mississippi experiencing their second-wettest August on record and to Florida experiencing its wettest summer on record.

Extreme water levels and water temperatures

  • In July, water in the Great Lakes reached temperatures of 60 and 65 degrees Fahrenheit – more than 10 degrees warmer than the same time last year.
  • In August, water temperatures of up to 97 degrees and low water levels caused tens of thousands of fish to die in Midwestern lakes and rivers.
  • Low water levels in the Mississippi watershed have caused some barge companies to reduce their loads by 25 percent and have caused harbor closures in Tennessee, Missouri, Arkansas and Mississippi.

According to the report, 2012 natural disasters (not including wildfires or drought) have caused $22 billion in insured losses and more than 220 deaths as of August. The full cost of 2012’s extreme weather events isn’t yet known, but it’s expected to rival 2011’s record-breaking $55 billion.

The document outlines what scientists following the link between extreme weather and climate change have been saying for years: more carbon pollution adds extra energy in the atmosphere, thus warming the planet and making extreme weather events more likely.

Read the full report here.

So what came into my in-box?  An announcement from The Climate Reality Project: 24 HOURS OF REALITY: The Dirty Weather Report.

NOVEMBER 14-15, 2012

A lot can change in a day. This November 14, we hope you can help us make big change happen.

Join The Climate Reality Project for 24 Hours of Reality: The Dirty Weather Report. This will be our second annual, online event showing how global climate change is connected to the extreme weather we experience in our daily lives. The entire 24-hour event will be broadcast live over the Internet.

We’ll move between our home studio in New York City and into each region of the world, bringing voices, news and multimedia content across all 24 time zones. We’ll feature videos from around the globe, man-on-the-street reports, music, and most importantly, stories from communities moving forward with solutions.

Most of all, we’ll generate new energy and urgency around the fact that we must — and we can — work together to address the climate crisis.

GET INVOLVED

Sign up today to be a part of the global community taking part in 24 Hours of Reality. RSVP on Facebook. Share this event with your friends. Submit your own video about the impacts of climate change where you live. And keep checking this page: We’ll post further details as the event draws closer.

Millions of people around the world know that the weather, their climate is changing.  But if you can take some more powerful evidence of just how it’s all changing then go and read a recent report on the Grist website, entitled ‘Deadly connection: New report on extreme weather and climate change’

So one more video to close.

Creativity, John Cleese style

The art and magic of being creative.

I can’t recall who it was that mentioned this TED video which is a great shame as I really should pay credit to a wonderful examination of the business of being creative.

“Telling people how to be creative is easy – being creative is difficult.” John Marwood Cleese (born 27 October 1939) is an English actor, comedian, writer and film producer. He achieved success at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and as a scriptwriter and performer on The Frost Report.

In the late 1960s he became a member of Monty Python, the comedy troupe responsible for the sketch show Monty Python’s Flying Circus and the four Monty Python films: And Now for Something Completely Different, The Holy Grail, Life of Brian and The Meaning of Life. In the mid 1970s, Cleese and his first wife, Connie Booth, co-wrote and starred in the British sitcom Fawlty Towers. Later, he co-starred with Kevin Kline, Jamie Lee Curtis and former Python colleague Michael Palin in A Fish Called Wanda and Fierce Creatures.

He also starred in Clockwise, and has appeared in many other films, including two James Bond films as Q, two Harry Potter films, and three Shrek films. With Yes Minister writer Antony Jay he co-founded Video Arts, a production company making entertaining training films. It was founded in 1972 by John Cleese, Sir Antony Jay, and a group of other television professionals. The videos feature well known British actors, and humorously explain business concepts. Productions include Meetings, Bloody Meetings and More Bloody Meetings, and have featured Cleese, Dawn French, Prunella Scales, Hugh Laurie, and Robert Hardy.

In December 1977, Cleese appeared as a guest star on The Muppet Show. Cleese was a fan of the show, and co-wrote much of the episode. He appears in a “Pigs in Space” segment as a pirate trying to hijack the spaceship Swinetrek, and also helps Gonzo restore his arms to “normal” size after Gonzo’s cannonball catching act goes wrong. During the show’s closing number, Cleese refuses to sing the famous show tune from Man of La Mancha, “The Impossible Dream”. Kermit the Frog apologises and the curtain re-opens with Cleese now costumed as a Viking trying some Wagnerian opera as part of a duet with Sweetums. Once again, Cleese protests to Kermit, and gives the frog one more chance. This time, he is costumed as a Mexican maraca soloist. He has finally had enough and protests that he is leaving the show, saying “You were supposed to be my host. How can you do this to me? Kermit — I am your guest!”. The cast joins in with their parody of “The Impossible Dream”, singing “This is your guest, to follow that star…”. During the crowd’s applause that follows the song, he pretends to strangle Kermit until he realises the crowd loves him and accepts the accolades. During the show’s finale, as Kermit thanks him, he shows up with a fictional album, his own new vocal record John Cleese: A Man & His Music, and encourages everyone to buy a copy. This would not be Cleese’s final appearance with the Muppets. In their 1981 film The Great Muppet Caper, Cleese does a cameo appearance as Neville, a local homeowner. As part of the appearance, Miss Piggy borrows his house as a way to impress Kermit the Frog. Cleese won the TV Times award for Funniest Man On TV — 1978-79.

Many people think you are either born with creativity or you aren’t. But John Cleese explains how to become creative and in the video, he talks about such thing as the unconscious mind.

John Cleese has his own website here.

Changing the mathematics of the climate!

An important plea to support a major road tour by the 350.org team.

Bill McKibben

There are a number of key players in the movement to arrest the affects of man on the world’s future climate and one of those is Bill McKibben.  His organisation, 350.org, has been at the forefront of raising the public’s awareness as to the terrible consequences of not changing our ways pretty damn soon.

As Wikipedia puts it,

William Ernest “Bill” McKibben (born 1960) is an American environmentalist, author, and journalist who has written extensively on the impact of global warming. He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College. In 2010, the Boston Globe called him “probably the nation’s leading environmentalist”  and Time magazine described him as “the world’s best green journalist.”

Anyway, something came in to my ‘in-box’ the other day that I wanted to share with all Learning from Dogs readers.  This is what was said,

Friends,

The reaction to our announcement of our national “Do the Math” road tour has been utterly pheneomenal.

Case in point: the event in Boston sold out in 24 hours. We’re trying to find another, larger venue to seat everyone, but the main point is this: this tour is going to be huge, and you need to be part of it.

Get your tickets here (math.350.org), and please do spread the word to everyone you know.

See you on the road,

Bill for the 350.org team

P.S. If you haven’t gotten a chance to read our first announcement, I’ve included it below.

 oooOOOooo

Dear Friends,

We’re getting ready for our most ambitious venture yet.

From November 7th to December 3rd, I’ll be on the road, visiting 20 cities in 20 nights (with a few days for travel in between) to help bring together the movement we need to make sure this planet has a future that we can all appreciate.

We’re calling it the Do the Math tour, but it’s not (thank heaven) just going to be me standing in front of a microphone.The goal is to jump-start the kind of movement that I discussed in the article I wrote for Rolling Stone about the scary new math of climate change. We will bring together musicians, artists and voices from across the movement to work together on directly confronting the financial and political might of the fossil fuel industry.

If you are near one of our stops, I want to make sure you’re there with us. You’re exactly the people we need to be there — folks who understand the climate math already, have experience in the movement, and are willing to step up to do more.


Click to check out the tour and RSVP

These events will need to be big, and reach beyond our normal circle of friends. That’s why we need to make sure that everyone knows that something big is underway. Can you take a moment to share the Do the Math tour site with your social networks?

       
Click to share on Facebook                 Click to share on Twitter

Also, just a heads up — we’re going to be putting together a live web event so that everyone who doesn’t happen to be near a tour stop can still get together and get a campaign started in their community. Our team is still hammering out the details for the exact date and time, but please keep an eye out — we absolutely need you in this fight.

I do a lot of talks to big groups, but this is a new kind of undertaking for me, and for 350.org. We’re trying to quickly build up some serious momentum, which is why we’ve gone to great lengths to make this a very different kind of event.

Not only will we have music and guests like Naomi Klein, Jim Hansen, Desmond Tutu, in person and via video, this event is also the kickoff to some serious organizing in your community. This tour will launch our next big mission — a campaign to directly confront the economic power of the fossil fuel industry. Our message will be crystal clear: it’s not OK to sacrifice our future for the sake of one industry’s bottom line. Divestment is one important tool that we’ll discuss, but we’re ready for many other tactics as well.

Over the past few months our planet gave stark warning signs that humans have never seen before. The Arctic melted, breaking every record. The Great Plains sweltered. The West burned. This roadshow is the next big step — but the price of admission, besides the ticket, is a willingness to really go to work to change the world in the year ahead. That’s why we need you this November.

The stakes have never been this high, and I’ve never been more serious.

Please join us: math.350.org

–Bill McKibben for 350.org

So go across to that Tour site, where you will read this,

On November 7th, we’re hitting the road to jumpstart the next phase of the climate movement.

It’s simple math: we can burn 565 more gigatons of carbon and stay below 2°C of warming — anything more than that risks catastrophe for life on earth. The only problem? Fossil fuel corporations now have 2,795 gigatons in their reserves, five times the safe amount. And they’re planning to burn it all — unless we rise up to stop them.

This November, Bill McKibben and 350.org are hitting the road to build the movement that will change the terrifying math of the climate crisis.

and see the link to the Tour locations and dates.

TOUR DATES & TICKETS

***Click a city to sign up and buy tickets.***

Don’t see your town on the map? You can still get involved by signing up here.

ABOUT THE TOUR

This won’t be your typical lecture.

Each event will be a unique and interactive experience, unlike any talk you’ve been to before. It will pick up where Bill McKibben’s landmark Rolling Stone article left off — and everyone who comes will be asked to join a growing movement that is strong enough to stand up to the fossil fuel industry. Together we’ll mount an unprecedented campaign to cut off the industry’s financial and political support by divesting our schools, churches and government from fossil fuels.

This won’t be easy: we’re up against the most profitable, powerful, and dangerous industry in history. But we have our own currency: creativity, courage and if needed, our bodies.

Never let it be said that we, as in all of us, don’t have the power to change the world.  Oh, and feel free to circulate today’s post.

Tad too much cabin pressure!

A short pencil is better than a long memory.

The origins of this saying seem to have disappeared in the mists of time but it’s a rare person that doesn’t write a list from time to time.  But when it comes to critical processes, having a list, or better known as a ‘checklist’ is essential to completing the process correctly.

With that in mind, then let me introduce you to a story recently sent to me by old friend Dan Gomez.

oooOOOooo

I’ve always done it this way!

This is an example of what happens when we do not pay attention to detail, and do not follow instructions and checklists!

A KC-135 Aircraft was being pressurized at ground level. The outflow valves which are used to regulate the pressure of the aircraft were capped off during a 5-year overhaul and never re-opened. The post-investigation revealed that a civilian depot technician who “had always done it that way” was using a homemade gauge, and no procedure.

Apparently, the technician’s gauge didn’t even have a max “peg” for the needle, so it was no surprise he missed it when the needle went around the gauge the first time.

As the technician continued to pressurize the aircraft with the needle on its second trip around the gauge there was a “boom”.  One KC-135 went bang!  Indeed, the rear hatch was blown over 70 yards away, through a blast fence!

An incident like this is never funny and is further regrettable when we consider that this mistake is one that we taxpayers will end up paying for. Fortunately, no one was reported as being injured.

This was a good “Lessons Learned” for making sure we have trained people, with the correct tools, and who are following detailed procedures. It should serve as a reminder that just because you’ve always done it that way, it does not make it the “right” way!

oooOOOooo

Now where did I leave that pencil!

Getting a good night’s sleep

Some fascinating insights into the nature of sleep.

Of the eleven dogs that we have at home, five are in what Jean and I call our bedroom group.  That group consists of Pharaoh, he of the LfD home page, young puppy GSD Cleo, little Jack Russell cross Sweeny, ex-Mexican rescue dogs Dhalia and Hazel.

Dhalia
Puppy Cleo

Most nights all of them except Pharaoh compete for space on the bed.  Turning over, as we all do during our sleep, is a challenge and I often have to be awake to accomplish the task.  Plus Cleo especially loves to wake me for an early-morning pee around 5am.  Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t have it any other way as much of the night, when I have turned to face the edge of the bed, my arm is around either Hazel or Dhalia.  To sleep with an arm around a dog that is cuddled into one’s chest is to stir wonderings of early man sleeping with his (her) dogs many thousands of years ago.

Plus one of the consequences of our regular fasting on Thursday and Friday of each week is that the reduced calorie intake seems to act as a diuretic for me; ergo, I am taking regular trips to the bathroom during the night!

Anyway, the result of these disturbed patterns of ‘sleeping’ is that my ambition of an unbroken 8 hours of sleep is rarely achieved.  So it was with great interest that I saw an article on the Big Think website, “Rethinking the 8-Hour Sleep Imperative, or Why You Should Take Naps“.  Here’s how it opened,

A restful night that includes eight hours of uninterrupted sleep is now more of a fallacy than ever before, partially because technology has demanded we attend to work, family and friends at all hours of the day. “[R]oughly 41 million people in the United States—nearly a third of all working adults—get six hours or fewer of sleep a night, according to a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.” But our own rigidity with respect to sleep patterns may be causing us harm, too, as we demand our bodies conform to the eight-hour regimen rather than observing more natural rhythms.

At the bottom there was a link to an article on The New York Times Sunday Review called Rethinking Sleep.  That set out, following from above,

And sleep deprivation is an affliction that crosses economic lines. About 42 percent of workers in the mining industry are sleep-deprived, while about 27 percent of financial or insurance industry workers share the same complaint.

The author, David K. Randall*, went on to write,

The idea that we should sleep in eight-hour chunks is relatively recent. The world’s population sleeps in various and surprising ways. Millions of Chinese workers continue to put their heads on their desks for a nap of an hour or so after lunch, for example, and daytime napping is common from India to Spain.

One of the first signs that the emphasis on a straight eight-hour sleep had outlived its usefulness arose in the early 1990s, thanks to a history professor at Virginia Tech named A. Roger Ekirch, who spent hours investigating the history of the night and began to notice strange references to sleep. A character in the “Canterbury Tales,” for instance, decides to go back to bed after her “firste sleep.” A doctor in England wrote that the time between the “first sleep” and the “second sleep” was the best time for study and reflection. And one 16th-century French physician concluded that laborers were able to conceive more children because they waited until after their “first sleep” to make love. Professor Ekirch soon learned that he wasn’t the only one who was on to the historical existence of alternate sleep cycles. In a fluke of history, Thomas A. Wehr, a psychiatrist then working at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md., was conducting an experiment in which subjects were deprived of artificial light. Without the illumination and distraction from light bulbs, televisions or computers, the subjects slept through the night, at least at first. But, after a while, Dr. Wehr noticed that subjects began to wake up a little after midnight, lie awake for a couple of hours, and then drift back to sleep again, in the same pattern of segmented sleep that Professor Ekirch saw referenced in historical records and early works of literature.

Later on, Mr. Randall highlights a NASA study …

In a NASA-financed study, for example, a team of researchers led by David F. Dinges, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, found that letting subjects nap for as little as 24 minutes improved their cognitive performance.

then reports that,

Robert Stickgold, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, proposes that sleep — including short naps that include deep sleep — offers our brains the chance to decide what new information to keep and what to toss. That could be one reason our dreams are laden with strange plots and characters, a result of the brain’s trying to find connections between what it’s recently learned and what is stored in our long-term memory. Rapid eye movement sleep — so named because researchers who discovered this sleep stage were astonished to see the fluttering eyelids of sleeping subjects — is the only phase of sleep during which the brain is as active as it is when we are fully conscious, and seems to offer our brains the best chance to come up with new ideas and hone recently acquired skills. When we awaken, our minds are often better able to make connections that were hidden in the jumble of information.

Anyway, do go and read the full article or, perhaps, follow the example of your dog!

Meanwhile, I think I will just take a little …….. nap!

* David K. Randall is a senior reporter at Reuters and the author of “Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep.”

The best and the worst of mankind – the worst.

This makes me so sick I can’t find an appropriate heading!

Just read this from the October edition of The National Geographic magazine!

Ivory Worship

Thousands of elephants die each year so that their tusks can be carved into religious objects. Can the slaughter be stopped?

By Bryan Christy

Photographs by Brent Stirton, Reportage by Getty Images

IN JANUARY 2012 A HUNDRED RAIDERS ON HORSEBACK CHARGED OUT OF CHAD INTO CAMEROON’S BOUBA NDJIDAH NATIONAL PARK, SLAUGHTERING HUNDREDS OF ELEPHANTS—entire families—in one of the worst concentrated killings since a global ivory trade ban was adopted in 1989. Carrying AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades, they dispatched the elephants with a military precision reminiscent of a 2006 butchering outside Chad’s Zakouma National Park. And then some stopped to pray to Allah. Seen from the ground, each of the bloated elephant carcasses is a monument to human greed. Elephant poaching levels are currently at their worst in a decade, and seizures of illegal ivory are at their highest level in years. From the air too the scattered bodies present a senseless crime scene—you can see which animals fled, which mothers tried to protect their young, how one terrified herd of 50 went down together, the latest of the tens of thousands of elephants killed across Africa each year. Seen from higher still, from the vantage of history, this killing field is not new at all. It is timeless, and it is now.

The full terrible article is here – if you have the stomach to read it.

Photograph by Brent Stirton, Reportage by Getty Images
To keep the ivory from the black market, a plainclothes ranger hacks the tusks off a bull elephant killed illegally in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park. In the first half of this year six park rangers died protecting Kenya’s elephants; meanwhile, rangers killed 23 poachers.

Integrity, part two.

A lifting of the importance of integrity is the key to our survival.

Let me start by reflecting on the difference between ‘truth’ and ‘integrity’.

Here’s one of the definitions of Truth: conformity with fact or reality; verity: the truth of a statement.

Here’s one of the definitions of Integrity: adherence to moral and ethical principles; soundness of moral character; honesty.

So while in yesterday’s article, I frequently referred to the word ‘truth‘, determining the ‘fact or reality‘ of a wide range of issues associated with anthropogenic climate change is not always straightforward.  Many of us probably have a strong intuition of the ’cause and effect’ of man’s footprint on this planet but a strong intuition is not the same as truth.

Then let’s turn to the notion of integrity. This is a much bigger issue, to my mind, the appalling lack of integrity!  Illustrated by one simple example.  How many leading politicians from any number of countries have demonstrated soundness of moral character; honesty with regard to the changing climate, even offering something as simple as “I don’t know!”

There’s a saying that pilots use, “If there’s any doubt, there’s no doubt!”  Come on, politicians and leaders, at the very least there is doubt!

OK, let me move on!

If integrity is partly defined as honesty, then while it’s easy to take a pot-shot at the world’s politicians maybe we need to look closer at home; ourselves.  Are we as honest with our own self as we now need to be?

Here’s an example that supports that question.

A few days ago there was a report on the website The Daily Impact about the crash of US fisheries.  Let me show you how that report opens,

Report: US Fisheries Crashing

We live in a country in which every household has two TV sets, most of them receiving hundreds of channels, and two cell phones, many of them “smart.” One of every two households has a computer connected to the Internet. This country is currently in the middle of a hotly contested presidential election. And yet among the things that have almost completely escaped public attention is this: last week the US government declared fisheries disasters on four coasts.

Reflect on that paragraph.  Surely it’s a reflection about the lack of integrity, of honesty, about our society?

The report ends thus,

The disaster declaration covering all these dire situations makes them eligible for Congressional aid, along with drought-stricken farmers in the Midwest and Southwest, flooded-out homeowners in New Orleans and along the Gulf, the fire-ravaged states of the far West, and the derecho-pounded Northeast. Congress will no doubt be delighted by the opportunity to help.

We eat nearly five billion pounds of seafood every year — about 16 pounds for each of us — and 85 per cent of it is imported (according to NOAA). Yet in the wake of this grim assessment of a large proportion of the domestic industry, and the questions it raises about the future sources of seafood, there is no discussion of “fisheries independence” or “peak fish” in politics or the media. Only in such outposts as this website and Mother Jones will the dire warning from the Commerce Department be reported as what it is — a dire warning.

Then there was a recent article on the Australian Permaculture news website about the US food and dairy industry.  Here’s how that opened,

Americans’ right to access fresh, healthy foods of their choice is under attack. Farmageddon tells the story of small, family farms that were providing safe, healthy foods to their communities and were forced to stop, sometimes through violent action, by agents of misguided government bureaucracies, and seeks to figure out why.

Filmmaker Kristin Canty’s quest to find healthy food for her four children turned into an educational journey to discover why access to these foods was being threatened. What she found were policies that favor agribusiness and factory farms over small family-operated farms selling fresh foods to their communities. Instead of focusing on the source of food safety problems — most often the industrial food chain — policymakers and regulators implement and enforce solutions that target and often drive out of business small farms that have proven themselves more than capable of producing safe, healthy food, but buckle under the crushing weight of government regulations and excessive enforcement actions.

I’m not going to insert that YouTube video into this post but you can link to both the full article and the film here.  For anyone interested in the fate of the family farm in the USA, the film is a ‘must see’!  Once again, the theme of integrity, of adherence to moral and ethical principles; honesty, comes to mind!

How I do want to close this rather personal reflection on present times (some may call it an indulgent reflection!) is by including a video from this seasons TED Talks.  It was brought to my attention by Christine over at her excellent blog 350 or bust.  The video is about resolving conflict,

William Ury, author of “Getting to Yes,” offers an elegant, simple (but not easy) way to create agreement in even the most difficult situations — from family conflict to, perhaps, the Middle East.

The reason why this seems like a very appropriate way to close this is because the way things are going at the moment, avoiding conflict could become rather important, rather soon!

It really is about integrity

A reflection on truth.

This is not the first time that I have wandered through this subject.  Indeed, Learning from Dogs would never have seen the light of day if, all those years ago, Jon Lavin hadn’t raised the fascinating idea that dogs are integrous animals.  As the quote says in the sidelink Purpose of Learning from Dogs;

There is nothing to fear except the persistent refusal to find out the truth, the persistent refusal to analyse the causes of happenings. Dorothy Thompson.

So what is it that has rocked my boat again?  A number of things, to be honest.  So much so, please forgive me for running these musings over to tomorrow!

Regular readers may have noticed that both Tuesday’s post Modelling the future and yesterday’s A study of man’s behaviours explored determining truth; frequently a fickle beast to track down!  Then last Monday, I read the latest post from Climate Denial Crock of the Week that was about Sea Ice Slowing to Minimum.  It was yet another reminder that embracing the truth of what is happening to our planet is vital, I mean VITAL, for anyone who has a reasonable expectation to be alive in 20 years time.

Here’s how Peter opened that post (published with Peter’s kind permission):

Not there yet, but in an interview with Dr. Jennifer Francis of Rutgers last week, the message was clear – the ice has retreated so much that at this point, we will already be experiencing the impacts of a low or no-ice arctic minimum, including “very interesting” weather in the northern hemisphere this fall and winter. Wow. I can’t wait.

Peter then included an update in that post, a reference to a report published in the Australian newspaper The Sydney Morning Herald.  I requested permission to republish the SMH article but that wasn’t granted, well to be factual it was offered at a fee of $420.75 – say no more.  Here is how that report from on board the Greenpeace ice-breaker Arctic Sunrise opened,

We are a few hundred miles from the north pole. The air temperature is -3C, the sea freezing. All around us in these foggy Arctic waters at the top of the world are floes – large and small chunks of sea ice that melt and freeze again with the seasons.

Arne Sorensen, our Danish ice pilot, is 18 metres up in the crow’s nest of the Arctic Sunrise vessel. Visibility is just 200 metres and he inches the 1,000-tonne Greenpeace ice-breaker forward at two knots through narrow passages of clear water.

A few paragraphs later come this:

More than 600,000 sq km more ice has melted in 2012 than ever recorded by satellites. Now the minimum extent has nearly been reached and the sea is starting to refreeze.

‘‘This is the new minimum extent of the ice cap,’’ [Sorensen] says – the frontline of climate change. ‘‘It is sad. I am not doubting this is related to emitting fossil fuels to a large extent. It’s sad to observe that we are capable of changing the planet to such a degree.’’

British, Italian and American scientists on the Arctic Sunrise say they are shocked at the speed and extent of the ice loss.

Over at the Guardian newspaper, their reporter John Vidal, also aboard the Arctic Sunrise, reports:

One of the world’s leading ice experts has predicted the final collapse of Arctic sea ice in summer months within four years.

In what he calls a “global disaster” now unfolding in northern latitudes as the sea area that freezes and melts each year shrinks to its lowest extent ever recorded, Prof Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University calls for “urgent”   consideration of new ideas to reduce global temperatures.

In an email to the Guardian he says: “Climate change is no longer something we can aim to do something about in a few decades’ time, and that we must not only urgently reduce CO2 emissions but must urgently examine other ways of slowing global warming, such as the various geoengineering ideas that have been put forward.”

Professor Peter Wadhams is head of the Cambridge University Polar Ocean Physics Group, from which one may learn,

Sea ice covers 7% of the surface of our planet. It is one of the most important and variable components of the planetary surface and is the key to understanding many basic questions about the energy balance of the Earth. The ice-covered seas represent the cold end of the enormous heat engine that enables the Earth to have temperatures suitable for human life over most of its surface.

Just go back and re-read, “.. the enormous heat engine that enables the Earth to have temperatures suitable for human life over most of its surface.”

So determining the truth of what is happening to our planet is not some elegant academic exercise, it is about determining the likelihood of human life surviving or not!

Doesn’t that put everything else we are doing into some form of perspective?  Let me rant on tomorrow!

Modelling the future.

Can we trust the predictive output of computer modelling?

I would be the first to admit that this is not an area where I have anything more than general knowledge.  However, what prompted me to think about this topic was a chance conversation with someone here in Payson.  We were chatting over the phone and this person admitted to being less than fully convinced of the ’cause and effect’ of man’s influence on the global biosphere.

When I queried that, what was raised was the idea that all modelling algorithms used in climate change predictions must incorporate mathematical constants.  I continued to listen as it was explained that, by definition, all constants were, to some degree, approximations.  Take, for example, the obvious one of the constant π, that Wikipedia describes as: a mathematical constant that is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Pi, of course, would have to be rounded if it was to be used in any equation.  Even taking it to thirty decimal places, as in 3.14159 26535 89793 23846 26433 83279, would mean rounding it to 3.14159 26535 89793 23846 26433 83280 (50288 being the 30th to 35th decimal places).

OK, so I must admit that I was leaning to the viewpoint that this person had a valid perspective.  I then asked Martin Lack, he of Lack of Environment and a scientifically trained person, for his thoughts.  The rest of this post is based on the information that Martin promptly sent me.

One of the links that Martin sent was to this post on the Skeptical Science blogsite.  That post sets out the common skeptics view, namely:

Models are unreliable
“[Models] are full of fudge factors that are fitted to the existing climate, so the models more or less agree with the observed data. But there is no reason to believe that the same fudge factors would give the right behaviour in a world with different chemistry, for example in a world with increased CO2 in the atmosphere.”  (Freeman Dyson)

The author of the Skeptical Science posting responds,

Climate models are mathematical representations of the interactions between the atmosphere, oceans, land surface, ice – and the sun. This is clearly a very complex task, so models are built to estimate trends rather than events. For example, a climate model can tell you it will be cold in winter, but it can’t tell you what the temperature will be on a specific day – that’s weather forecasting. Climate trends are weather, averaged out over time – usually 30 years. Trends are important because they eliminate – or “smooth out” – single events that may be extreme, but quite rare.

Climate models have to be tested to find out if they work. We can’t wait for 30 years to see if a model is any good or not; models are tested against the past, against what we know happened. If a model can correctly predict trends from a starting point somewhere in the past, we could expect it to predict with reasonable certainty what might happen in the future.

So all models are first tested in a process called Hindcasting. The models used to predict future global warming can accurately map past climate changes. If they get the past right, there is no reason to think their predictions would be wrong. Testing models against the existing instrumental record suggested CO2 must cause global warming, because the models could not simulate what had already happened unless the extra CO2 was added to the model. All other known forcings are adequate in explaining temperature variations prior to the rise in temperature over the last thirty years, while none of them are capable of explaining the rise in the past thirty years.  CO2 does explain that rise, and explains it completely without any need for additional, as yet unknown forcings.

I strongly recommend you read the full article here.  But I will republish this graph that, for me at least, is a ‘slam dunk’ in favour for modelling accuracy.

Sea level change. Tide gauge data are indicated in red and satellite data in blue. The grey band shows the projections of the IPCC Third Assessment report (Copenhagen Diagnosis 2009).

Not only does this show that the data is within the range of projections of the modelled output, more seriously the data is right at the top end of the model’s predictions.  The article closes with this statement:

Climate models have already predicted many of the phenomena for which we now have empirical evidence. Climate models form a reliable guide to potential climate change.

There is a more detailed version of the above article available here.  Do read that if you want to dig further down into this important topic.  All I will do is to republish this,

There are two major questions in climate modeling – can they accurately reproduce the past (hindcasting) and can they successfully predict the future? To answer the first question, here is a summary of the IPCC model results of surface temperature from the 1800’s – both with and without man-made forcings. All the models are unable to predict recent warming without taking rising CO2 levels into account. Noone has created a general circulation model that can explain climate’s behaviour over the past century without CO2 warming. [my emphasis, Ed.]

Finally, back to Lack of Environment.  On the 6th February, 2012, Martin wrote an essay Climate science in a nut fragment.  Here’s how that essay closed:

Footnote:
If I were to attempt to go even further and summarise, in one single paragraph, why everyone on Earth should be concerned about ongoing anthropogenic climate disruption, it would read something like this:

Concern over anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) is not based on computer modelling; it is based on the study of palaeoclimatology. Computer modelling is based on physics we have understood for over 100 years and is used to predict what will happen to the atmosphere for a range of projections for CO2 reductions. As such, the range of predictions is due to uncertainty in those projections; and not uncertainties in climate science. Furthermore, when one goes back 20 years and chooses to look at the projection scenario that most-closely reflects what has since happened to emissions, one finds that the modelled prediction matches reality very closely indeed.

In his email, Martin included these bullet points.

  • Concern over anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) is not based on computer modelling.
  • It is based on our understanding of atmospheric physics (and how the Earth regulates its temperature).
  • Computer modelling is based on this physics (which we have understood for over 100 years).
  • Models have been used to predict temperature and sea level rise for a range of projections for CO2 emissions. 
  • The wide range of predictions was due to uncertainty in those emissions projections not uncertainties in climate science. 
  • This can be demonstrated by looking at predictions made over 20 years ago in light of what actually happened to emissions.
  • The model predictions for both temperature and sea level rise are very accurate (if not slightly under-estimating what has happened).

Sort of makes the point in spades!  The sooner all human beings understand the truth of what’s happening to our planet, the sooner we can amend our behaviours.  I’m going to pick up the theme of behaviours in tomorrow’s post on Learning from Dogs.

Finally, take a look at this graph and reflect!  This will be the topic that I write about on Thursday.

The dreaded ‘A’ word – Alzheimer.

Science may just be starting to make some sense of this cruelest of diseases.

It used be to the dreaded ‘C’ word; cancer.  But now that ‘C’ word has a companion, the dreaded ‘A’ word.  The incidence of Alzheimer’s disease seems to be on a terrible rise.  Indeed, my wife, Jean, lost her late husband to Alzheimer’s disease.  My half-sister back in England is now very ill with the disease.  Just chatting to some people here in Payson a few days ago revealed many who had friends or relations suffering.

So a recent item first seen on the website of The Permaculture Research Institute of Australia really jumped off the ‘page’!  It was an article by George Monbiot entitled The Mind Thieves.  I dropped Mr. Monbiot a quick email requesting permission to republish the article and very promptly received a positive answer.  Thank you, Sir.

So before moving to the article, first a little background on George M.  From his website, one quickly reads,

George Monbiot

I had an unhappy time at university, and I now regret having gone to Oxford, even though the zoology course I took – taught, among others, by Richard Dawkins, Bill Hamilton and John Krebs – was excellent. The culture did not suit me, and when I tried to join in I fell flat on my face, sometimes in a drunken stupor. I enjoyed the holidays more: I worked on farms and as a waterkeeper on the River Kennet. I spent much of the last two years planning my escape. There was only one job I wanted, and it did not yet exist: to make investigative environmental programmes for the BBC.

I’m not going to copy the full ‘About George‘ description but do urge you to pop across to here and read it yourself; George has had, trust me, a fascinating life journey that I suspect is far from over.  This is how that About description closes,

Here are some of the things I love: my family and friends, salt marshes, arguments, chalk streams, Russian literature, kayaking among dolphins, diversity of all kinds, rockpools, heritage apples, woods, fishing, swimming in the sea, gazpacho, sprinting up the pitch in ultimate frisbee, ponds and ditches, growing vegetables, insects, pruning, forgotten corners, fossils, goldfinches, etymology, Bill Hicks, ruins, Shakespeare, landscape history, palaeoecology and Father Ted.

Here are some of the things I try to fight: undemocratic power, corruption, deception of the public, environmental destruction, injustice, inequality and the misallocation of resources, waste, denial, the libertarianism which grants freedom to the powerful at the expense of the powerless, undisclosed interests, complacency.

Here is what I fear: other people’s cowardice.

I still see my life as a slightly unhinged adventure whose perpetuation is something of a mystery. I have no idea where it will take me, and no ambitions other than to keep doing what I do. So far it’s been gripping.

The article was first published in the British Guardian newspaper (there’s an online link to it here) as the article mentions below.  But I am republishing, in full thanks to George, the copy that appeared on George’s website on the 10th September last, including the references.

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The Mind Thieves

September 10th, 2012

The evidence linking Alzheimer’s disease to the food industry is strong and growing.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian, 11th September 2012

When you raise the subject of over-eating and obesity, you often see people at their worst. The comment threads discussing these issues reveal a legion of bullies, who appear to delight in other people’s problems.

When alcoholism and drug addiction are discussed, the tone tends to be sympathetic. When obesity is discussed, the conversation is dominated by mockery and blame, though the evidence suggests that it can be driven by similar forms of addiction(1,2,3,4). I suspect that much of this mockery is a coded form of snobbery: the strong association between poor diets and poverty allows people to use this issue as a cipher for something else they want to say, which is less socially acceptable.

But this problem belongs to all of us. Even if you can detach yourself from the suffering caused by diseases arising from bad diets, you will carry the cost, as a growing proportion of the health budget will be used to address them. The cost – measured in both human suffering and money – could be far greater than we imagined. A large body of evidence now suggests that Alzheimer’s is primarily a metabolic disease. Some scientists have gone so far as to rename it. They call it diabetes type 3.

New Scientist carried this story on its cover last week(5): since then I’ve been sitting in the library trying to discover whether it stands up. I’ve now read dozens of papers on the subject, testing my cognitive powers to the limit as I’ve tried to get to grips with brain chemistry. While the story is by no means complete, the evidence so far is compelling.

Around 35 million people suffer from Alzheimer’s disease worldwide(6); current projections, based on the rate at which the population ages, suggest that this will rise to 100 million by 2050(7). But if, as many scientists now believe, it is caused largely by the brain’s impaired response to insulin, the numbers could rise much further. In the US, the percentage of the population with diabetes type 2, which is strongly linked to obesity, has almost trebled in 30 years(8). If Alzheimer’s, or “diabetes type 3”, goes the same way, the potential for human suffering is incalculable.

Insulin is the hormone which prompts the liver, muscles and fat to absorb sugar from the blood. Diabetes 2 is caused by excessive blood glucose, resulting either from a deficiency of insulin produced by the pancreas, or resistance to its signals by the organs which would usually take up the glucose.

The association between Alzheimer’s and diabetes 2 is long-established: type 2 sufferers are two to three times more likely to be struck by this dementia than the general population(9). There are also associations between Alzheimer’s and obesity(10) and Alzheimer’s and metabolic syndrome (a complex of diet-related pathologies)(11).

Researchers first proposed that Alzheimer’s was another form of diabetes in 2005. The authors of the original paper investigated the brains of 54 corpses, 28 of which belonged to people who had died of the disease(12). They found that the levels of both insulin and insulin-like growth factors in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients were sharply reduced by comparison to those in the brains of people who had died of other causes. Levels were lowest in the parts of the brain most affected by the disease.

Their work led them to conclude that insulin and insulin-like growth factor are produced not only in the pancreas but also in the brain. Insulin in the brain has a host of functions: as well as glucose metabolism, it helps to regulate the transmission of signals from one nerve cell to another, and affects their growth, plasticity and survival(13,14).

Experiments conducted since then appear to support the link between diet and dementia(15,16,17,18), and researchers have begun to propose potential mechanisms. In common with all brain chemistry, these tend to be fantastically complex, involving, among other impacts, inflammation, stress caused by oxidation, the accumulation of one kind of brain protein and the transformation of another(19,20,21,22). I would need the next six pages of this paper even to begin to explain them, and would doubtless get it wrong (if you’re interested, please follow the links on my website).

Plenty of research still needs to be done. But if the current indications are correct, Alzheimer’s disease could be another catastrophic impact of the junk food industry, and the worst discovered so far. Our governments, as they are in the face of all our major crises, appear to be incapable of responding.

In this country as in many others, the government’s answer to the multiple disasters caused by the consumption of too much sugar and fat is to call on both companies and consumers to regulate themselves. Before he was replaced by someone even worse, the former health secretary, Andrew Lansley, handed much of the responsibility for improving the nation’s diet to food and drinks companies: a strategy that would work only if they volunteered to abandon much of their business(23,24).

A scarcely-regulated food industry can engineer its products – loading them with fat, salt, sugar and high fructose corn syrup – to bypass the neurological signals which would otherwise prompt people to stop eating(25). It can bombard both adults and children with advertising. It can (as we discovered yesterday) use the freedoms granted to academy schools to sell the chocolate, sweets and fizzy drinks now banned from sale in maintained schools(26). It can kill the only effective system (the traffic light label) for informing people how much fat, sugar and salt their food contains. Then it can turn to the government and blame consumers for eating the products it sells. This is class war: a war against the poor fought by the executive class in government and industry.

We cannot yet state unequivocally that poor diet is a leading cause of Alzheimer’s disease, though we can say that the evidence is strong and growing. But if ever there was a case for the precautionary principle, here it is. It’s not as if we lose anything by eating less rubbish. Averting a possible epidemic of this devastating disease means taking on the bullies: those who mock people for their pathologies and those who spread the pathologies by peddling a lethal diet.

References:

1. Caroline Davis et al, 2011. Evidence that ‘food addiction’ is a valid phenotype of obesity. Appetite Vol. 57, pp711–717. doi:10.1016/j.appet.2011.08.017

2. Paul J. Kenny, November 2011. Common cellular and molecular mechanisms in obesity and drug addiction. Nature Neuroscience, Vol. 12, pp 638-651. doi:10.1038/nrn3105

3. Joseph Frascella et al, 2010. Shared brain vulnerabilities open the way for nonsubstance addictions: Carving addiction
at a new joint? Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 1187, pp294–315. doi: 10.1111/j.1749-6632.2009.05420.x

4. Ashley N. Gearhardt et al, 2010. Can food be addictive? Public health and policy implications. Addiction, 106, 1208–1212. ad. d_3301 1208..1212 doi:10.1111/j.1360-0443.2010.03301.x

5. Bijal Trivedi, 1st September 2012. Eat Your Way to Dementia. New Scientist.

6. Sónia C. Correia et al, 2011. Insulin-resistant brain state: The culprit in sporadic Alzheimer’s disease? Ageing Research Reviews Vol. 10, 264–273. doi:10.1016/j.arr.2011.01.001

7. Fabio Copped`e et al, 2012. Nutrition and Dementia. Current Gerontology and Geriatrics Research, Vol. 2012, pp1-3. doi:10.1155/2012/926082

8. See the graph in Bijal Trivedi, 1st September 2012. Eat Your Way to Dementia. New Scientist.

9. Johanna Zemva and Markus Schubert, September 2011. Central Insulin and Insulin-Like Growth Factor-1 Signaling – Implications for Diabetes Associated Dementia. Current Diabetes Reviews, Vol.7, No.5, pp356-366. doi.org/10.2174/157339911797415594

10. Eg Weili Xu et al, 2011. Midlife overweight and obesity increase late life dementia risk: a population-based twin study. Neurology, Vol. 76, no. 18, pp.1568–1574.

11. M. Vanhanen et al, 2006. Association of metabolic syndrome with Alzheimer disease: A population-based study. Neurology, vol. 67, pp.843–847.

12. Eric Steen et al, 2005. Impaired insulin and insulin-like growth factor expression and signaling mechanisms in Alzheimer’s disease – is this type 3 diabetes?. Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, Vol. 7, pp.63–80.

13. Konrad Talbot et al, 2012. Demonstrated brain insulin resistance in Alzheimer’s disease patients is associated with IGF-1 resistance, IRS-1 dysregulation, and cognitive decline. The Journal of Clinical Investigation, Vol.122, No.4, pp.1316–1338. doi:10.1172/JCI59903.

14. Naoki Yamamoto et al, 2012. Brain insulin resistance accelerates Aβ fibrillogenesis by inducing GM1 ganglioside clustering in the presynaptic membranes. Journal of Neurochemistry, Vol. 121, 619–628. doi: 10.1111/j.1471-4159.2012.07668.x

15. Eg:
Wei-Qin Zhao and Matthew Townsend, 2009. Insulin resistance and amyloidogenesis as common molecular foundation for type 2 diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease.
Biochimica et Biophysica Acta, Vol.1792, pp.482–496. doi.org/10.1016/j.bbadis.2008.10.014,

16. Sónia C. Correia et al, 2011. Insulin-resistant brain state: The culprit in sporadic Alzheimer’s disease? Ageing Research Reviews Vol. 10, 264–273. doi:10.1016/j.arr.2011.01.001

17. T. Ohara et al, 2011. Glucose tolerance status and risk of dementia in the community, the Hisayama study. Neurology, Vol. 77, pp.1126–1134.

18. Karen Neumann et al, 2008. Insulin resistance and Alzheimer’s disease: molecular links & clinical implications. Current Alzheimer Research, Vol.5, no.5, pp438–447.

19. Eg: Lap Ho et al, 2012. Insulin Receptor Expression and Activity in the Brains of Nondiabetic Sporadic Alzheimer’s Disease Cases. International Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, Volume 2012. doi:10.1155/2012/321280

20. Suzanne M. de la Monte, 2012. Contributions of Brain Insulin Resistance and Deficiency in Amyloid-Related Neurodegeneration in Alzheimer’s Disease. Drugs, Vol. 72, no.1, pp. 49-66. doi: 10.2165/11597760

21. Ying Liu et al, 2011. Deficient brain insulin signalling pathway in Alzheimer’s disease and diabetes. Journal of Pathology, Vol. 225, pp.54–62. doi: 0.1002/path.2912

22. Konrad Talbot et al, 2012. Demonstrated brain insulin resistance in Alzheimer’s disease patients is associated with IGF-1 resistance, IRS-1 dysregulation, and cognitive decline. The Journal of Clinical Investigation, Vol.122, No.4, pp.1316–1338. doi:10.1172/JCI59903.

23. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/nov/12/government-health-deal-business

24. http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/apr/14/obesity-crisis-doctors-fastfood-deals-ban

25. http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jun/11/why-our-food-is-making-us-fat

26. http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/sep/10/junk-food-academy-schools-claims

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Don’t know about you but the above is a fine example of investigative reporting.  It deserves the widest circulation because if it is proved that there is a link between diet and Alzheimer’s disease then, once again, it shows how taking personal responsibility for our health has huge implications for us, our families and for society at large.